Cooking with Kids: Slimy, Tasty Reporting in the 'Wall Street Journal'
Photograph by jasja dekker on Flickr
Did you know the Wall Street Journal has great food coverage? I didn’t, until I started obsessively following the banking crisis. After a while I got bored with Bernanke and Paulson (amazing, I know) and found that the Journal is particularly strong when it comes to food and restaurants in Asia, presumably because they cover the Asian markets and reporters get hungry.
That’s how I came across this delightful story, Where the Slimy Things Are. The writer, Stephen Yoder, wrote for the Journal from Japan in the ’90s, and when his assignment ended, he told his 8- and 10-year-old sons they could choose a restaurant for their farewell dinner from any of their Tokyo favorites.
So our last stop in town before heading toward Narita Airport was a cramped restaurant in a hallway off a subway station that, by family consensus, served the world’s best maguro-natto.
Sushi fans will recognize the *maguro* as tuna. To appreciate this dish, it is necessary to understand the *natto.* Charitably put, natto is fermented soybeans that have a sort of nutty flavor—as well as a suspicious brown color, the stringiness of airplane glue and the musky odor of lightly rotted vegetable matter.
However you feel about natto, I’ll bet you’re going to love the rest of this story, which never mentions really gross things like credit default swaps.
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9 Comments:
Hmmm... I find natto a lot less intimidating once the condiment packs of tsuyu and mustard are mixed in. For those looking to get into eating natto for its health benefits though, Indonesian tempeh has the same goodness and tastes (to my palate) a lot more like chicken nuggets =p
onedaylingers at 9:16PM on 10/05/08
Unless you don't brown it enough, and then it tastes like a mouthful of swingset chain. But yes, 38 times more approachable than the natto.
markemorse at 5:08AM on 10/06/08
I can eat natto in small amounts like atop sushi, but nothing like most of my family who eat it over a steaming bowl of rice. It's difficult for me to get past the 1-month-old-so-funky-smelling-that-it's-crunchy gym sock smell. I do overcome it when I'm paying for it though.
Cassaendra at 9:22AM on 10/06/08
Does anyone else find that natto tastes like coffee to them? I do.
mamster at 9:53AM on 10/06/08
Tastes like spiderwebs and burnt tires.
DaveRud at 10:27AM on 10/06/08
The taste doesn't bother me at all, and I can hold my breath so I don't smell it. What got me was the texture. I can not adequately describe the mouth-feel of this stuff. Gooey, stringy, sticky, and you can still feel it in your mouth several bites of rice later...
MollieBeth at 12:59PM on 10/06/08
@MolliBeth I totally agree about the texture!
The first time I tried it with rice, I felt like the natto coated around each rice grain, so everytime I tried to chew the rice it would slip out from between my teeth (it was like trying to catch goldfish with those stupid paper nets). By the time I finished my bowl, my jaws were sore, and I ended up swallowing half of the rice whole. I am totally willing to try it again, but is this natto-rice-covering thing typical? Do I just need to work on my chewing technique?
caroliiine at 1:17PM on 10/06/08
MollieBeth: Your description sounds a little bit like chewing on mozzarella. Gummy aftertaste included ;)
onedaylingers at 2:56PM on 10/06/08
Natto is fine. It's like the smell of funky cheese plus the consistency of beans+melted marshmellow.
melissamccart at 9:28AM on 10/07/08